Wednesday, October 30, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #94

The
exercise of benevolence is necessary but not sufficient to solve the racial
quagmire in which America and its Church find themselves. For too long we have
engaged in the abstraction of spiritual and social; accepting the Church as a
spiritual institution that might, but need not, surprise us with occasional
social activism or pleas for justice. Embarrassingly, this behavior has become
normative in many American congregations. But rarely do we annihilate this abstraction
by demanding that the Church fulfill its social and biblical responsibility to
speak for the voiceless and engage in self-critique to ensure that it does not
succumb to the seduction of power. In fact, beyond conceptions of evangelism
and benevolence, we are largely unaccustomed to speaking about the
“responsibilities” of the Church at all.